The Dealmaster: A nice Windows 8 laptop and a great 50-inch TV

It's Monday and we have a lot of deals—including a Samsung 840 SSD!

A felicitous Monday holiday season greeting to you all, Arsians! We are counting down the time to the end of the year, and the Dealmaster will be visiting you twice a week from now until we close out the month. I shall be like an elf of savings, tiptoeing into your bedroom or office and dropping off tasty deals crafted just for you!

Our buddies at LogicBuy are hard at work, slaving in their Savings Factory, digging up and packaging tons of awesome things just for you. I've picked out only the best for our readers, and you'll find them below. This week, we kick off with a deeply discounted Toshiba i5 Windows 8 laptop, but we've also got plenty of other fun things! The chairs and office furniture keep drawing tremendous interest, and so there are several in this round of deals.

The laptop looks good, but its nuts to buy a new laptop now with Win 8 that does not have a touchscreen.

By Jan there's going to be a ****load of laptops with touchscreens to pick from - I can live with my laptop being dated in a year or a year and half, but not 2 months.

The touchscreen's going to add $100ish to the price; at the $500 pricepoint there are other features I consider much more important. To shoehorn the touch layer in you'd need to drop down to a Celeron or Brazos level CPU; unless you explicitly need the touchscreen for something that's not a tradeoff I'd want to make. I'm dubious about the touch layer on most laptops actually getting much use anyway.

The laptop looks good, but its nuts to buy a new laptop now with Win 8 that does not have a touchscreen.

By Jan there's going to be a ****load of laptops with touchscreens to pick from - I can live with my laptop being dated in a year or a year and half, but not 2 months.

The touchscreen's going to add $100ish to the price; at the $500 pricepoint there are other features I consider much more important. To shoehorn the touch layer in you'd need to drop down to a Celeron or Brazos level CPU; unless you explicitly need the touchscreen for something that's not a tradeoff I'd want to make. I'm dubious about the touch layer on most laptops actually getting much use anyway.

With anything other than Win 8 I would agree with you.

But with Win 8 you _need_ a touchscreen. I have used W8 with a wacom touch so I can use multi touch, but its still not good enough (although its pretty good)

I was actually looking for a basic AIO for my mother for the holidays, and when compared spec to spec with all the others that I have looked at, this one was great on paper comparatively. It looks like it is shipping with Windows 7, which is great for my mother, as Win 8 would probably just confound her at this point.

I only dabbled with the various preview versions of Win 8 on my laptop, but since launch I've had it on my desktop and laptop, I've tweaked some things for sure, but at no point have I felt that I needed a touchscreen. What you _need_ is to learn the shortcut keys and to spend some time learning the OS. Now that I'm acclimated I think it's a very worthwhile upgrade for desktops.

In other deal news, 128GB 830 at MicroCenter for $70 (in store only), and 840's cheaper than above on Amazon. In all of these deal posts so far, I've never seen anything that is a truly compelling bargain. Lukewarm deals at best.

Anyone have any recommendations on an SSD? I don't need huge, I'm putting windows 7 on there, and maybe a few core program installations. I don't need an 80GB, but I would like a good drive. I don't know what drive lines are good, so any recommendations and/or guides would be helpful (I know the basics, and some of how they work (thanks, Ars!), but I've seen a number of comments on the past dealmasters about BAD SSDs, and I'd like to avoid that.

The Samsung 840 series is reliable and fast, although not as fast as the prior 830 series. I've also heard very good things about the Crucial M4 and Kingston HyperX drives. Generally I have heard not-so-good things about OCZ.

Anyone have any recommendations on an SSD? I don't need huge, I'm putting windows 7 on there, and maybe a few core program installations. I don't need an 80GB, but I would like a good drive. I don't know what drive lines are good, so any recommendations and/or guides would be helpful (I know the basics, and some of how they work (thanks, Ars!), but I've seen a number of comments on the past dealmasters about BAD SSDs, and I'd like to avoid that.

Thanks!

I'm not as familiar with the Intel lineup, but they seem very reliable, I'm a fan of Samsung, for personal use I would suggest the 830 or 840, whichever is cheaper at the time. Ars posted a lengthy review that inaccurately concluded that the 840 was slower than the 830 across the board, the 840 Pro beats both hands down in all categories, but the normal 840 beats the 830 in a number of benchmarks.

The performance difference between the 830 and the 840 will not be apparent to the average user, which is why I suggest getting whichever is cheaper at the time.

Lee Hutchinson / Lee is the Senior Reviews Editor at Ars and is responsible for the product news and reviews section. He also knows stuff about enterprise storage, security, and manned space flight. Lee is based in Houston, TX.